Question

SSL from letsencrypt.org has expired and dev is afk. Help!

Posted on January 7, 2017
Security
Asked by landonswan

My dev is afk this weekend and the SSL expired yesterday. Site is now giving users a privacy error: maxonall.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=maxonall.com

I need to either:

renew the SSL
make it so the site doesnt require https

I am not a dev but have root access (dangerous right!?). Timing is important as we have a lot of users heading to the site in 1 hour. Any help is appreciated.

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Jonathan Tittle • January 7, 2017

Accepted Answer

@landonswan

If you’re not familiar with the CLI, I would recommend trying to get in touch with your developer before tinkering around in areas you’ve not worked with. That being said, what you’re wanting to do can be done relatively easy and, so long as you’re careful, you shouldn’t run in to any issues.

To start, login to your Droplet an run the following command (this simply lists all files and directories)

ls -al /etc/letsencrypt

Do you see your domains’ SSL certificate in there? If so, we should be able to use certbot to renew the SSL certificate for your domain and simply restart Apache/NGINX for the changes to take effect.

If it’s not, then the process gets a little more hands on as you’ll need to create a new SSL certificate, modify Apache/NGINX configuration, save, and restart before the changes will take effect.

What’s your OS (Operating System)?

newbie • January 8, 2017

you better read this tutorial once again.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04